Did it seem as if the big story, both before and after Tuesday, was turnout — as in how big it was?

But there might well be a Hampton Roads twist on this nationwide story.

Statewide, turnout soared to 59 percent (up from 42 percent in the last mid-term federal election). But in the hard fought 2nd Congressional district race, turnout was a bit below this, a 56 percent.

That translated to a roughly 57,000-vote drop in Rep. Scott Taylor’s total vote from what he won in 2016 — yes, that was a presidential year when we see the biggest turnout.

But point is that the drop in Taylor’s vote was far steeper than the slide of roughly 37,000 in total votes cast in the 2nd district in 2018 compared to 2016.

The difference? Elaine Luria, who was elected as the district’s next member of Congress, received 20,000 more votes than did the 2016 Democratic candidate, Shaun Brown.

That sharp dip in Taylor's vote total, steeper than the decline in the total votes cast in the district, is what tells the tale, says Quentin Kidd, director of Christopher Newport University's Wason Center for Public Policy.

In other words, plenty of GOP-inclined voters stayed home while Democrats flocked to the polls.

"I think it was the signature scandal, it was Republican voters who decided they couldn't support him because of the signature scandal and had no other reason to go and vote ... if you didn't want to come out because of the signatures and they didn't want to come out because of Corey Stewart, you'd just stay home."

He thinks those factors, maybe more than voters’ feelings about President Donald Trump, swung the district.

An aggressive ad campaign in the final two weeks of the campaign refocused attention on the Taylor staff who are under investigation for alleged election fraud with their efforts to get Brown on the ballot as an independent, he said. The aim of such an odd effort by one campaign to get another candidate on the ballot, at a guess looked to be an effort to split the Democratic vote.

"Luria ran a disciplined campaign ... she only mentioned Donald Trump once, and she did it in response to a question from Joel Rubin moderating a debate when he asked her why she wasn't talking about Trump," Kidd said. "She wanted the race to be about her, and about health care and not about Trump."

The race in 2nd, argues Stephen Farnsworth, political scientist at the University of Mary Washington, suggests that Republican activists still haven’t realized how much Virginia has changed in the past two decades — specifically, how important suburban voters are now.